ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 AMD mini-Review

This is mostly a post to try and get me to start blogging a bit more again, but I will try and make it potentially useful…

When I returned to the United Kingdom from New Zealand last year, I had four laptops (and some other smaller electronic gear) in total I ideally wanted to bring back with me in some way or another. One of the laptops was my then-replaced and barely-used older Intel MacBook Pro 15 - which I had replaced with an M2 Pro in 2023 - but I did still occasionally use as it could run some old x86 Mac software (although the machine itself barely ran due to fans not working), and I didn’t really want to install Rosetta 2 on my M2 Pro. The other older laptop was my very-regularly-used ThinkPad T480s, which I got in 2019 and generally liked a lot for Linux, but was quite anemic on the CPU-performance front, so I had been tempted anyway to replace it with a newer version.

When I looked into shipping my “stuff” back to the UK, several shipping companies mentioned I couldn’t ship electronics with Lithium-ion batteries in for safety reasons, which I had envisaged doing for these two older laptops (and then I’d just take the other two newer laptops with me on the plane back). I enquired with several other companies and the situation was a bit ambiguous, as some companies at first said it wouldn’t be an issue to send them back, but when I asked someone else at the same company they then said it was an issue, so I decided it wasn’t worth risking it using this method of getting them back.

I did also look into shipping them back with DHL or something, just as an individual isolated shipment of the two laptops (and other smaller devices), which while technically possible was expensive and was also a bit complicated, as if I wanted it to get through customs on the UK side, I seemed to need to address the shipment to myself and not a third-party, which was a bit impractical, as I was planning on stopping off in Vancouver for a week, and didn’t really want to get relatives to pretend to be me or something.

So I decided to just dispose of the older two laptops, and only bring the two newer ones back with me on the plane, and then I’d get a new ThinkPad for Linux use when I was back in the UK.

Once back in the UK, I decided to get a ThinkPad T14s AMD, but wasn’t quite sure whether to risk going with the newer Gen 6 version, which didn’t seem to have as-good Linux kernel compatibility, or stick with the older Gen 5 one which had better compatibility at the time. I also noted in reviews that there was mention of fans running quite a bit with the Gen 6 AMD. I decided to risk going for the Gen 6 version in the end though.

Once it arrived towards the end of July, I couldn’t easily get Linux Mint or Ubuntu to run on it, as the stock distro kernel was too old for the newer AMD hardware (I think support had only landed in the kernel in around April). It looked like Linux Mint would within a couple of months release a newer kernel with better hardware compatibility, so I temporarily installed Fedora on the laptop and used it with that distro for a while.

That experience with the laptop was reasonably good: compared to the T480s, the screen was a lot nicer (a bit brighter and also 16:10 aspect ratio!) while still being matte, the machine in general was a lot more powerful (CPU and GPU) and the speakers were noticeably better. Waking from sleep was also faster than the T480s was (still not as quick as the MacBook Pros though!).

On the downsides, the keyboard wasn’t quite as good - there was less key travel, and Lenovo had decided to swap the position of the Ctrl and Fn keys, which was quite frustrating due to muscle memory (there’s an option to swap them in the BIOS), and the lack of the built-in Ethernet port was mildly annoying (especially at first with Wifi support not existing in earlier Linux kernels), but is somewhat understandable. Another minor irritation was that the hinge is quite a bit stiffer to open than on the T480s, which in practice means it’s a lot more difficult to open the lid one-handed when it’s closed on a desk for example: you end up lifting up the entire front of the laptop instead of the screen just opening.

But the biggest annoyance was the fans: compared to the T480s - where to my knowledge I didn’t have to install or configure anything to get the fans to behave “normally” - i.e. no air movement or noise when the machine is idle and fans ramp up when the thermal temp increases - it seems with the T14s Gen 6 AMD, the fans are always on “medium”, even with the machine at idle with temps in the 45 degC range (i.e. even in the BIOS), and the fans speed up even more as the temps increase when the CPU/GPU is used heavily (understandably).

When Linux Mint 22.2 was released in September (and moved to kernel 6.14 which included better support for the newer AMD chipsets), I re-installed the machine with that distro from that point on. Unfortunately, it turns out that with this new setup of Linux Mint and kernel 6.14, XOrg would randomly lock up (although the mouse cursor would still move), although the machine was still running okay in the background, but Xorg/UI-started applications would crash/close.

This was quite frustrating, as the issue would generally happen every ten minutes or so, and normally happened when I was trying to select text with the mouse or scroll with the trackpad. If I just left the machine running a UI terminal session doing nothing else, or didn’t use the mouse as much it seemed far less prone to happening.

I eventually discovered the cause and a work-around for this issue: it turns out that AMD made a GPU driver change with Kernel 6.14 which turned a feature called Panel Self Refresh (PSR) on, and there was a bug in the implementation with this kernel version which was causing the GPU driver to lock-up.

A forum post regarding the issue and work-arounds for it can be found on the Framework community forum here.

Implementing the amdgpu.dcdebugmask=0x12 kernel boot parameter mitigation to turn PSR off again solves the issue for me completely.

I had hoped (given the kernel fix for the PSR issue was submitted upstream back in August 2025) that kernel 6.17 (which Linux Mint has just started supporting) would have included the full fix, meaning the above kernel boot parameter work-around wouldn’t be needed any more, but today I’ve tested that theory by commenting out the work-around and rebooting, but unfortunately even with kernel 6.17 active the issue still happens, so I still need the work-around by the looks of things.

All in all though, other than the issue with the fans being persistent and overly-enthusiastic, the laptop’s pretty good, although I do miss the fact that the T480s “just worked” from my perspective, and I didn’t need to configure anything with the older machine. Battery life on this new T14s Gen 6 also isn’t great - partly I think due to the fans always running, and possibly due a tiny bit to the PSR-disabling work-around. I can get just over four hours of use with low-CPU usage and medium display brightness (this is after tuning things a bit with powertop), which is worse than my older T480s could do even with a 5-year-old battery.

In terms of the fans, I have tried messing around with thinkfan to try and control the fans a bit more and slow them down when not needed, and while that sort of works to a limited degree, thinkfan doesn’t seem that stable in practice and often seems to crash or get stuck after awakening from sleep, so for the moment I’m just putting up with the fans always being on.

Camera Lens Fixed

This week I got my Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM lens back from Canon Service after it being fixed by them. The replaced part was the “Power Diaphragm Assembly”.

So this morning I went for a brief stroll around Wellington to test it out, and it seems as good as new now, which is great - and even the occasional focus issues I had been having within the past eight months didn’t seem to obviously exhibit themselves, which is a bonus - so I assume those were either caused by the part starting to fail, or otherwise it could just be that Canon re-calibrated the lens as part of the service.

Camera Lens Issue

Last weekend my Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM lens developed a fault whereby my DSLR camera would show an “Err 01”, “Communication between the camera and lens is faulty.” error when trying to take a picture. Stopping down the aperture to f/2.8 prevented it from happening, and with that aperture I could still take pictures with the lens - and it only happened with this particular lens, other lenses were still okay - so it seems something has broken with it.

I haven’t recently knocked or treated it in an obvious way that might have suddenly caused this - 5 years ago I did drop it though, but it’s been fine immediately since then, but within the last six months I have noticed it doesn’t always focus as well as it used to, but I’m not sure whether that would be connected to what in this instance seems like an electronic issue vs something more like focus slippage.

Cleaning the lens contacts didn’t resolve the issue, so I’ve had to send it off to Canon Service in the hope it can be fixed pretty quickly, which is a bit annoying as it’s my main lens.

Camera Repaired

A few weeks ago I finally got around to sending my Canon EOS 5D Mk IV in to Canon Service to be looked at regarding the very bad battery drain it has had since I got it almost a year ago, even when fully turned off.

Last week Canon returned it saying they’d replaced some parts to fix it, so as well as testing that they had - which was confirmed by a fully-charged battery still being charged 12 hours after being left in the camera overnight with it fully powered off! - I spent a few hours walking around town doing some photography.

New Camera Gear

A few weeks ago I splashed out a rather alarming amount of money on a new DSLR camera (Canon EOS 5D Mk IV) and a new lens (Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM), both upgrades from the previous versions of each. I certainly didn’t need new versions of either, and to some extent it was one of my fairly silly impulse purchases that I end up regretting after clicking the ‘Purchase’ button, but I’m travelling back to Europe for a few weeks in two months, and I wanted a camera with GPS built-in for geo-tagging photos, more megapixels (stitching panoramas of water doesn’t work perfectly), a use-able live-view, in addition to having better low-light performance. It will also likely guilt me into getting back into photography a bit more, which this blog post is also an attempt to do. I did semi-seriously think about jumping to mirrorless with Sony, but I do like Canon gear (they are behind technically currently though) and I have several Canon lenses, so it wasn’t an obvious win for me to make the switch.

I’m relatively happy with the new camera and lens: the new II version of the lens is noticeably shaper, although the vignetting falloff/gradient is also much more pronounced than with the old version, and the distortion’s different - although both of those can be corrected in software. The GPS geo-tagging is useful, but unfortunately I’ve found the battery life of my camera is really bad, as even with GPS totally off (there are two “Enabled” modes as well as fully “Disabled”), within a day of the camera being turned physically “Off” with the battery fully-charged in my camera bag and GPS mode set to “Disabled”, the battery’s consistently drained, and this is happening with multiple Canon batteries (including the one the camera came with), so I’m really not happy about that aspect. I think something must be wrong with my copy electronically, as a colleague has a Mark IV as well without the issue, and clearly most people online don’t seem to have the issue. At some point I’ll send it in to Canon to get it looked at and hopefully fixed, but pulling the battery out of the camera works around the long-term storage problem for the moment, and on trips abroad I’ll likely be charging batteries every night, so it’s not the end of the world.

The exposure sensitivity of the Mark IV also seems quite different to the Mark III: I’m having to stop down one or two stops to match the Mark III’s levels - I guess the light metering is more accurate or something (although I’d argue photos are getting overexposed with it compared to my Mark III with neutral exposure), but that’s not really a problem if I just keep the setting stopped down on the camera to match the results I got with the Mark III (which seem more controlled and less over-exposed).

In a further act of semi-madness, I also ordered a Samyang AF 14mm f/2.8 lens which from reviews looked like it was one of the cheapest wide-angle primes for astrophotography that still had semi-reasonable performance, as I’m very keen to try and get into astrophotography after several previous failed attempts. I’ll be giving that a go when it arrives, and when the night sky clears up and the wind dies down (need a heavier tripod!).